Outsource My Social Media Marketing

Initiating social media communications with existing and potential customers require some thoughtful planning. You have to be non-obtrusive and engaging. Otherwise the conversation will fizzle out even before it begins. Practice the following when opening up social media talk:

1. Observe and listen.

Monitor the social networks for ongoing online communications about your product, brand or niche. You can do this manually, by hanging out at social networks, blogs and forum communities. Or you can use monitoring tools like Technorati, TweetDeck, or Google Alerts to filter and track online communications. After a while you can get the pulse of what people are talking about and how they are talking. You can also conduct market research on your niche, industry or competitor. When you eventually join in conversations or open up a new one, you are knowledge-equipped and ready for fruitful conversations.

2. Know when to talk, and when not to.

Tasteful conversations are appropriate and perfectly-timed. No butting into people’s conversations. No off-center remarks, incessant gabbing, nor aggressive behavior. People find it annoying to be a target of a marketing pitch in one-on-one communications, direct tweets, wall-to-wall posts, or blog comments. Expect a major freeze when you exhaust people with talk about you and your product. When you run out of things to say, a simple “thank you” or “we care” is enough.

3. Really talk.

Vary your topic of conversations. Intersperse casual and engaging talk with your product announcements, event promotions, or company advertising. Be relevant without being rude or arrogant, making sure that people get useful information from conversing with you. You can bring users industry news, or dish out informative or instructional articles. When you really have to push your product, do so with third-party product reviews. When you stimulate two-way communications, you can also gain useful feedback about your business from others, and address customer complaints effectively.

4. Balance casual and corporate communications.

The challenge of social media marketing is infusing both personality and professionalism in each message sent. A right dose of personality keeps conversations interesting, charming fans and followers alike. But too much of it may turn off costumers away from your brand. A professional tone should also be maintained to preserve the company reputation.

5. Remember that people — not tools – market.

People are unaffected by system-generated emails. Real people are behind successful social media communications. They may use tools for effective marketing, but the wit, intelligence and the warmth infused behind every message, are what’s keeping customers engaged.

6. Build a social media culture.

All of your social media talk above is geared towards creating the perfect mindsets and motivations that will encourage your customers to keep coming back for more conversation. People should rally to a theme or concept that you propose for your product or business. They should be transformed from skeptics to loyalists, from lurkers to active participants of your social media culture. They should be empowered to speak out and feel that their voices make a difference. A quality-crafted message sent out in multiple channels like blogs, forums or tweets; a call to respond; plus a social media policy that upholds security and privacy, will keep the culture going for a long time.

Remember that a social media culture is not grown overnight. It takes a lot of patience and commitment to cultivate. In the end, your culture transforms into one associated with reliability, trust and transparency, making for loyal and satisfied social media participants.

Building Better Cars and Better Customer Relations.

Hyundai has been getting a lot of attention these days as a company that cares about its customers and part of this success can be credited to social media marketing. By integrating a customer relationship management (CRM) strategy with social media along with their traditional marketing, Hyundai has branded itself as an altruistic company that really does care about its’ customers. In fact – Hyundai has jumped ahead of every other car manufacturer in the critical customer satisfaction index (CSI) category. Here are a few examples how Hyundai is applying their social media marketing strategy in key parts of their business and how it is paying off.

Promotion

Hyundai’s Assurance Program began in early 2009 when the economy was at its worst and unemployment was rising rapidly. The Hyundai Assurance Program promised that if you got laid off from your job, you could return your car and not even have to worry about honoring the rest of the note payable. The promotion was innovative but coming from a major car corporation was it believable? The attention the campaign received from the press and from many blogs and websites was skeptical.

Hyundai began promoting the idea on Facebook and Twitter. They asked everyone to buzz and tweet about it and people responded with enthusiasm. The idea of social networking for business exposure is not new but the strategy was extraordinary because it laid the groundwork for the campaign and gave it credibility. It was a brilliant way to market a promotion that really did work. Sharing this information on Facebook and Twitter turned out to be a big plus for the car company’s marketing campaign.

Hyundai sales are up 6.2 percent through November 2009. This marks the eleventh consecutive month of year-over-year gains in retail market share by Hyundai. The Hyundai Assurance Program is without doubt one of the reasons their sales have increased this year while other car manufacturers have floundered.

Corporate Responsibility

Zafar Brooks, Director of Government Relations and Diversity Outreach at Hyundai, has a refreshing perspective on the value of social media when combined with corporate outreach programs. The Hyundai “Hope on Wheels” program fights pediatric cancer by funding cancer research programs across the country. Brooks understands the importance of authenticity and relevance in social media outreach, particularly on behalf of corporate charitable programs.

He said: “Consumers are more sophisticated now — corporate social responsibility programs are no longer something that is ‘nice’ to do, but it’s expected of the company,” noted Brooks. “Simultaneously, consumers will smell-out what is not authentic — Hope on Wheels isn’t advertised, but is part of the news we share with our brand loyalists,” he said. “It is a part of our story because it is a part of who we are and what we are about. Social media should be authentic and organic.”

Mr. Brooks added, “Brand leaders must align themselves with a cause that is consistent with corporate values so they can illustrate their relevancy. Leadership has to establish the priorities around which we stand and make it part of our messaging point.”

Brooks concluded: “All social media should link together with a common objective to develop a program based on who we want to talk to about what we want to accomplish. Social media outreach must be part of a cohesive approach. Consumers will smell-out what is not authentic!”

Aftermarket

Hyundai Aftermarket recently announced the launch of a new social media campaign. The goal was to give Hyundai owners a new way of finding content on the internet about modifying their vehicles. The interactive social media campaign involves additional features being built into the Hyundai forum that owners can use effectively to get the word out about what they are doing to make their cars stand out from the rest. Twitter accounts and Facebook “Fan Pages” have been built so that owners can follow live updated news feeds about Hyundai Aftermarket as well.

“Finding important and relevant information is not easy when you are unfamiliar with how to perform certain modifications,” said a Hyundai spokesperson. “Having a forum and website where answers to important questions are laid out for you, would help with modifying your Hyundai to its highest potential.”

While the site has been branded as the “web’s most premier Hyundai forum” and currently is the oldest Hyundai forum on the internet, it has been designed for both the amateur and professional car enthusiast in mind. The site is built on the principle of being very easy going and helpful to anyone who may or may not know a lot about Hyundai’s. Users register for free and can partake in discussions about Hyundai Accents, Tiburons, Elantra’s, Sonata’s, Santa Fe’s and the all new Hyundai Genesis.

In addition to providing great technical content, hyundaiaftermarket provides great off topic discussions ranging in everything from technology to music & movies to even food and health/nutrition.

Are you looking for a company to benchmark? One you might consider looking at first is Intel Corporation.

CASE STUDY
It all started in the early 2000′s with grassroots employee participation. One employee in particular, Josh Bancroft, started to build out the social infrastructure in 2004. The result was the creation of Intelpedia, a team based wiki collaboration site launched in November of 2005. Today, Intelpedia contains over 15,000 articles from Intel employees defining, collaborating and documenting their part of the Intel workplace.

Over time, Intel created a comprehensive set of social media policies simply called the Intel Social Media Guidelines. These guidelines are now available in over 35 languages designed to help everyone use social media in a respectful and responsible way.

(And if you want to really explore what cross section of these social media guidelines look like across companies and industries, you can refer to the Social Media Governance website, with over 105 Social Media policy documents from a wide variety of companies — all available for free at Social Media Governance Database.)

It is important to recognize that merely having social media policies in place at an organization does not necessarily mean an organization’s employees will understand them or incorporate them into their daily jobs. Instead employees must be trained in how to use social media to drive business results. It is the training and policies combined that provide a framework for employees to increase their participation in social media. With this framework in place, a comfort level evolves between employee participation and management’s concerns. Both find satisfaction that everyone is on the same page and that the expectations and responsibilities of social media participation are clearer.

To better foster and manage social media, Intel’s next step was the creation of the Social Media Center of Excellence, a cross functional body of experts in Legal, Marketing, PR, and Web Communications, who come together to create guidelines, processes, strategies, and skill-building courses for how Intel employees can responsibly and respectfully use such social media tools as blogs, wikis, Twitter, Foursquare, and social networks around the world.

In June 2008, Intel added the Digital IQ training program on how to use these social media tools to increase innovation, communication and collaboration at work. The company has created a series of over 60 online courses, organized as an online university granting Intel employees a certification in Digital IQ. The Digital IQ certificate was created to up-level sales and marketing employees’ skills and understandings of the dynamic digital marketing world. While the target audience was Sales & Marketing, the program is open to all global employees who wish to expand their understandings of digital and emerging media.”

The Digital IQ courses cover such areas as:

Tweet Like You Mean It: The Right Way To Tweet Your Brand
The Importance of Brand Identity in Social Media
WOM (Word Of Mouth) The Anatomy of Buzz
Social Media Measurement
Viral Marketing
Mobile Marketing: Wide Reach of a Small Screen
China’s Social Media Landscape

Intel employees select a unique certification path based upon their job role. Then they plan a curriculum path of both required and elective courses leading to a certification in their Digital IQ. Since its inception in 2008, more than 20,000 Intel employees have completed Digital IQ training. Intel went one step further by creating a Masters Course called Digital IQ 500 which licenses Intel employees to practice social media on behalf of the company.

As you plan your social media strategy, first ask yourself: what are the sweet spots in your business where social media can have the most impact? For Intel, it is focusing on the entire population of sales and marketing population who can go through Digital IQ training and then move on to participating and collaborating on the social web. For a company with a large population of new hires, this could mean creating an internal corporate social network to build greater speed in collaboration, innovation and problem-solving.

How are you:

Building a community among your global employee base?
Engaging employees and customers to more easily collaborate with each other?
Moving from a marketing campaign to having a conversation with your customers?
Training your employees to be active participants in using social media to build your brand?
What have you done to customise your social media policy uniquely to your business needs. A specialist legal firm familiar with the social media space is best. They are equipped to advise you on the IP and employee issues that relate to creating your social media policy.

BlandsLaw is a specialist legal firm advising companies on establishing their social media policies. They also offer staff training programmes in social media policies and speak at various conferences on social media policies.

Internet Reputation Management is the practice of manipulating or reshaping one’s search results to reflect a more positive, or accurate, depiction of a particular person or company. This industry got started in 2006, originally to defend children from the dangers of social networking sites. However, it has evolved into something more than that.

The Internet, and search engines particularly, has become more important as a source for information, whether that is an impression of a celebrity or a review of a product. Think about it—when you are going to try a new restaurant, go see a movie, look up a celebrity, buy a new product, you look to the Internet, and especially search engines, for information. Search engines allow for the aggregation of a great deal of information, most of which is user-generated, rather than produced by any professional journalist. Using a search engine to find new information about a subject has become so common, in fact, that “Google” has become a verb. You’ve heard it before, “’I don’t know anything about H.L. Mencken.’ ‘Well Google him!’” User-generated journalism, often in the form of blogging, is incredibly unpredictable, though, and notoriously unreliable.

Negative search results are quite common, and although they are sometimes perfectly understandable—often they are ridiculous or simply false. Input “Octomom” or “David Vitter” and you will see a plethora of negative comments which any person would say they may or may not deserve. However, I think we can all agree that both Nadya Suleman (Octomom) and David Vitter have a right to publicize themselves in a positive light, too, rather than letting their reputations be held hostage to the whims of angry bloggers and forum trolls.

The only effective way to fight back against this anonymous barrage of negativity in their search results is to hire an Internet Reputation Management professional. They will conduct a campaign, on a business or individual’s behalf, that will help them to publicize themselves more positively. Although they cannot remove the offending search results, they can push them down in rank—onto the second, third, or fourth page—where hardly anyone will see them. This is the essence of Internet Reputation Management, the suppression of links through the elevation of positive publicity.

It is a known fact that there are incremental benefits from social media marketing and it is essential that every business owners and website owners to take advantage of that.  One surefire way to dominate social media channels is to get help from a good social media company. Wouldn’t it be nice to promote in a way that it is not just advertisements? One of the jobs of social media company is to provide high quality interactions without having to deal with real customers. The challenge in social media however comes such as time constraints or there are not enough personnel who can handle the method of promoting. This is where a social media company becomes an ideal option. If you are a business owner and you are in dilemma of whether or not to hire a social media company, better read on…

You might be considering the option of outsourcing social media marketing. Probably you are seeing the benefits but you simply don’t know what to look for inb a social media company. In this economy where more and more people are becoming unemployed, they entitle themselves as the “social media experts”. If you are unaware about how the online industry works, you might just fall to scams or a social media company that doesn’t have the capacity to really skyrocket your business. There are many social media company out there that claim they are the experts but in the end, they only want to drain your pockets.

So to make sure that you won’t fall for these unscrupulous social media company, here are some things to consider when finding an outsource social media solutions:

1.    Look at the reputation of these social media company. One way to see if they are authority is to check where they rank in the World Wide Web. You can use some tools to check or you simply type in their name in your search browser then that’s it! You can see if this social media company really knows their thing. But this is not the only indicator that the service is reliable and reputable. Here are some ways you can check:

•    Go to Twitter Grader. This is a good way to check the grade or the score of the particular social media company you are looking at. This tool provides a grade from 0 to 100, 100 being the highest. For a more specific assessment, you can even know their ranking in their specific city or state demographic. By using this twitter grader tool, you can see whether the company is highly capable or not.

•    Use Facebook Grader. Simply enter the name of the social media company  and click grade. Just like twitter, it generates 0 to 100 score, 100 being the highest.
2.    Check the track record of the social media company. You can do this by knowing what their past and current clients have to say. Of course you want to make sure that majority of them have positive experiences and have only success stories to share.

3.    The social media company should present to you a streamlined strategic plan. An expert social media company must be able to present to you a concrete social media marketing plan that you can follow along.

4.    The social media service must provide round-a-clock support where they are willing to sit down and discuss to you your goals and milestones. They must be able to help you set goals and provide you reports at how their social media efforts are doing.

So these are just the basic things to consider when considering outsourcing your social media marketing. Hiring a reputable social media company is the best option so far for those businesses who have limited resources. There are lots of social media companies out there and using these tips, you should be able to end up with the most efficient one.

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